Copying should be possible directly from the terminal

[spodskubka]

The current Copy/URL Mode is very clumsy. It was intended to provide users with the ability to copy text from the terminal without needing too much development effort on my part. The plan was to replace it with something better at a later time, when I had more time available and less bugs to fix.

It should be possible to mark and copy text directly in the terminal, without changing to a copy mode first.

This has been requested by multiple users via Windows Store reviews and/or e-mails.

[spodskubka]

The clickable URL feature, which is available in the Copy/URL mode at the moment, will probably have to go.

The reason for this is performance. The Copy/URL mode copies the current screen content in a temporary buffer and scans this buffer once for URLs, which turn to actual links in the RichEditBox. If I wanted to make clickable links in the terminal screen, the terminal screen would have to be scanned for URLs after each change to its contents, which could happen quite often at times.

No other SSH client I know of has a feature like this, probably for the very same reason, so I consider this a "nice to have" and something that should be omitted when performance would suffer.

[spodskubka]

I just noticed that the Terminal application that is available by default on Ubuntu Linux (gnome-terminal) implements both of these features wonderfully.

I just did some tests while running apt-get upgrade.

• URLs are underlined when moving the mouse over them (unclear whether they are located upon mouse-over or when they are written to the terminal) and opened in the default browser when clicked on.
• Selecting text is possible directly in the terminal.
• Selecting text makes it inverted (exchanged background and foreground colors).
• When text inside a selection is changed the selection disappears.
• Selecting text is not only possible by clicking and dragging, but also by double-clicking to select a whole word and triple-clicking to select a whole line.
• The selection persists when lines are scrolled up/down in the terminal and also into the scrollback.
• The selection persists when the user scrolls up/down and also when the user scrolls the selection out of view.
• The visible terminal content does not change while the user holds the left mouse button to select text, changes are applied after the left mouse button is released (unclear whether processing of the incoming data stream is halted or if it is just processed in the background).

In my opinion this exact behavior would also be desirable for Remote Terminal.